The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson 2 Correspondence with George Cheyne and Thomas Edwards

Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-82285-5 - Samuel Richardson: Correspondence with George Cheyne: Correspondence with Thomas Edwards Edited by David E. Shuttleton and John A. Dussinger Frontmatter More information

the cambridge edition of the correspondence of samuel richardson 2

correspondence with george cheyne and thomas edwards

© in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-82285-5 - Samuel Richardson: Correspondence with George Cheyne: Correspondence with Thomas Edwards Edited by David E. Shuttleton and John A. Dussinger Frontmatter More information

the cambridge edition of the works and correspondence of samuel richardson

general editors Thomas Keymer University of Toronto Peter Sabor McGill University

Thanks are expressed to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Leverhulme Trust, the Chancellor Jackman Professorships Program, the Canada Research Chairs Program and Le Fonds queb´ ecois´ de la recherche sur la societ´ eetla´ culture for providing research funding towards the creation of this edition.

Advisory board Paula R. Backscheider, David Blewett, Margaret Anne Doody, David Fairer, Isobel Grundy, Jocelyn Harris, John Mullan, Claude Rawson, John Richetti, Kathryn Sutherland, Janet Todd, Howard Weinbrot

the cambridge edition of the works and correspondence of samuel richardson

the works 1. Early Works 2. Pamela 3. Pamela in her Exalted Condition 4–7. Clarissa 8–11. Sir Charles Grandison 12. Later Works and Index

the correspondence 1. Correspondence with Aaron Hill and the Hill Family 2. Correspondence with George Cheyne and Thomas Edwards 3. Correspondence with Sarah Wescomb, Frances Grainger and Laetitia Pilkington 4. Correspondence with Sarah Chapone, Hester Mulso Chapone and their Circles 5–7. Correspondence with Lady Bradshaigh and Lady Echlin 8. Correspondence with Edward Young, Johannes Stinstra, Eusebius Silvester and Lady Barbara Montagu 9. Correspondence Primarily on Pamela and Clarissa (1732–1749) 10. Correspondence Primarily on Sir Charles Grandison (1750–1754) 11. Correspondence of Richardson’s Final Years (1755–1761) 12. Additional Letters, Appendices and General Index

SAMUEL RICHARDSON

CORRESPONDENCE WITH GEORGE CHEYNE

edited by David E. Shuttleton

CORRESPONDENCE WITH THOMAS EDWARDS

edited by John A. Dussinger

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521822855 c Cambridge University Press 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed in the United Kingdom by CPI Group Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Richardson, Samuel, 1689–1761. [Correspondence. Selections] Correspondence with George Cheyne / edited by David E. Shuttleton ; Correspondence with Thomas Edwards / edited by John A. Dussinger. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 978-0-521-82285-5 (hardback) 1. Richardson, Samuel, 1689–1761 – Correspondence. 2. Novelists, English – 18th century – Correspondence. 3. Cheyne, George, 1671 or 1672–1743 – Correspondence. 4. Edwards, Thomas, 1699–1757 – Correspondence. I. Shuttleton, David E. editor of compilation. II. Dussinger, John A. editor of compilation. III. Title. IV. Title: Correspondence with Thomas Edwards. PR3666.A4 2013 823 .6–dc23[B] 2013030431 ISBN 978-0-521-82285-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations page viii General Editors’ Preface ix Acknowledgements xxiii Chronology xxv List of Abbreviations xxxiv General Introduction xxxvii richardson’s correspondence with george cheyne 1 richardson’s correspondence with thomas edwards 179

Appendices 423 I Verses and Memorials included in Richardson’s Copybook of the Cheyne Correspondence 425

II Note on Rebecca Warner’s Original Letters (1817) 431

III Note on the Provenance of Richardson’s Copybook of the Cheyne Correspondence 432

IV Richardson’s Index to his Correspondence with Edwards 435

V Names of those Readers to be Permitted to Read the Richardson–Edwards Correspondence 460

Index 461

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ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Mezzotint portrait of George Cheyne MD, engraved by John Faber the Younger in 1732, derived from a painting by Johan Van Diest, and sold ‘at the Great Toy Shop in Bath’ (Private Collection, by permission) page lxxxii 2 Portrait of Thomas Edwards by William Holl, Sr, after unknown artist, stipple engraving, published 1828 C National Portrait Gallery, London 178

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GENERAL EDITORS’ PREFACE

Thanks to the editorial labours of the twentieth century, there are few major British authors of the eighteenth century – the classic period of the familiar letter as a genre – whose correspondence is not available in a standard scholarly edition. Some of the most ambitious undertakings, such as the Yale edition of James Boswell and the Oxford/McGill-Queen’s edition of Frances Burney, are still in progress, and some of the most long-standing, such as the Oxford and Chicago editions of Alexander Pope and Edmund Burke respectively, now require extensive supplementation, perhaps even replacement. But there is no more anoma- lous case than Samuel Richardson, whose correspondence holds special interest, beyond its extraordinary scale and range, as that of a practising epistolary novelist who thought longer and harder than any contemporary about the letter as a form. Almost half of the surviving Richardson correspondence, which totals almost 1,700 letters, has never appeared in print, and barely a quarter of it is represented – with silent abridgements, conﬂations, and other interventions – in the early edition on which scholars have had to rely until now, Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s six-volume The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (1804). The process of publication got off to a good enough start. Individual items began appearing in print within Richardson’s lifetime, and in his last years he took practical steps towards preparing a selected edition. Even before the success of Pamela propelled him to fame in the early 1740s, a reply he wrote in humorous couplets to a guild invitation – emphatically a rhyming letter, not a verse epistle – found its way into the Gentleman’s Magazine for January 1736. The epistolary commentaries he printed about later novels, such as his Answer to the Letter of a Very Reverend Worthy Gentleman, Objecting to the Warmth of a Particular Scene in...Clarissa (1749) or his Copy of a Letter to a Lady, Who Was Solicitous for anAdditionalVolumeto...SirCharlesGrandison(1754), were formal versions of actual letters, written and sent in response to letters he received. Richardson also included as an appendix to Sir Charles Grandison extracts from his acrimonious correspondence with George Faulkner, the Dublin bookseller, about literary piracy and property. Fourteen complete or abridged letters from the poet Aaron Hill, Richardson’s closest literary adviser for many years, appeared in print before this time, either in the expanded second edition of Pamela or, more extensively, in The Works of the Late Aaron Hill (1753). By 1757, when a Leipzig bookseller named Erasmus Reich approached Richardson requesting to publish a selected edition in German, he had already been at work for at least two years in sorting

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his correspondence files for family use, and he considered Reich’s proposal very seriously. Surviving manuscripts are marked up for publication in his tremulous late hand, with names disguised and wordings improved, and he discussed the project with at least two correspondents, Lady Bradshaigh and Sarah Wescomb Scudamore. The following year he abandoned the idea, largely because of scruples about confidentiality. But he continued to think of the correspondence as publish- able after his death, subject to permission from the writers involved, if necessary as a subscription edition to support his daughters. A venture of some such kind seems to have been in prospect in about 1780, when Richardson’s nephew William issued proposals for a new edition of the novels to contain, among other addenda, ‘a collection of letters written by him on moral and entertaining subjects, never before published’.1 But the edition in question never materialized, and it was not until the death of Richardson’s last surviving daughter in 1803, and the subsequent acquisition of his manuscripts by the radical bookseller Richard Phillips, that publication was at last achieved. The edition that Barbauld prepared for Phillips has been widely criticized for its undeclared editorial freedoms. Yet Barbauld’s treatment of manuscript sources was within the publishing conventions of her day, and the many small-scale changes made to punctuation and other accidentals were not her own but the work of compositors in the five printing-houses among which Phillips, in his haste to recoup his outlay, distributed production. Thanks to the researches of Barbauld’s modern biographer, William McCarthy, we now know the constraints under which she produced her edition, in at most three months between receiving the original manuscripts and delivering copy to the press, and under relentless harassment from the impatient Phillips.2 That said, it remains the case that many if not most of the 442 letters represented in Barbauld’s edition are silently abridged and otherwise revised, with quite serious chronological scrambling of key correspondences (notably with Edward Young and Lady Bradshaigh), frequent misdatings elsewhere, and at least twenty-five cases in which apparently single letters in fact splice together two or more different sources; hence the total of 442 letters represented in her edition, though she appears to include only 411. Barbauld edited directly on to the manuscripts she received, many of which had already been edited by Richardson himself, and no doubt the printers worked from these originals, almost three-quarters of which later went missing. The result is that Barbauld’s six-volume edition is, for all its defects, the only surviving witness

1 John Nichols, Anecdotes of Bowyer (1782), p. 157. On these abortive early attempts and the later transmission of the manuscripts, see T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 436–9, and Louise Curran, ‘“Into Whosoever Hands Our Letters Might Fall”: Samuel Richardson’s Correspondence and “the Public Eye”’, Eighteenth-Century Life 35 (2011), 51–64; also Curran, ‘Samuel Richardson: The Author as Correspondent’ (diss., University of London, 2011). 2 William McCarthy, ‘What Did Anna Barbauld Do to Samuel Richardson’s Correspondence? A Study of Her Editing’, Studies in Bibliography 54 (2001), 191–223.

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for 324 letters;3 similar uncertainties surround the text of other letters now known only from early printed sources. Barbauld’s slashing deletions in green ink can still be seen on the manuscripts that survived this process, and she was defensive about the haste of her selections. No one should find fault, she wearily declared, ‘unless he had submitted to his inspection, not only the letters that are taken, but those also which are left’.4 It was clear on all sides, however, that much more than mere chaff remained unpublished. The first supplement to Barbauld appeared in the European Mag- azine and London Review, which serialized a number of Richardson’s letters to Sarah Wescomb over three volumes in 1808–9. Phillips’s Monthly Magazine fol- lowed suit with its own selections of unpublished correspondence: first between Richardson and the poet and translator Elizabeth Carter (1813), then a lengthy, important series between Richardson and the poet Edward Young, published over a six-year period (1813–19), and finally a brief exchange between Richardson and his fellow-novelist Tobias Smollett (1819), from a somewhat longer correspondence that Barbauld had missed or ignored. Items from other correspondences, not all of them in Phillips’s hands, appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1816–17), Rebecca Warner’s miscellany Original Letters (1817), and posthumous collections of works by various writers, notably the bluestocking feminist Hester Mulso Chapone (in 1807) and the German poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (in 1821). This process had more or less run its course by 1828, when Phillips ran into financial difficulties and was forced to sell his manuscript collection at auction. A single purchaser, William Upcott, was able to keep much of the collection together, but important parts of it were dispersed (in some cases now untrace- ably), and publication seems not to have been the motive for any of the buyers involved. The letters not bought by Upcott, and some he sold by private treaty before his death in 1845, are now scattered among numerous archives, many of these in England, Scotland and the United States, with smaller collections in Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland and Canada, and a few in private hands. The bulk of Upcott’s purchase eventually found its way into the South Kensington (now the Victoria & Albert) Museum, where it has been publicly available since the death in 1876 of its last private owner, the literary journalist John Forster, as part of a much larger bequest. Catalogued as the Forster Collection, it contains about half of the surviving correspondence: some 850 letters arranged and mounted in six massive volumes (probably the work of Richard Forster Sketchley, Assistant

3 McCarthy reports that ‘of the 442 letters represented in the Correspondence, manuscript texts are known (as of 2002) to survive for 111’ (‘What Did Barbauld Do’, p. 208); seven further manuscripts of letters used by Barbauld are reported in Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, ‘Samuel Richardson’s Correspondence: Additions to Eaves and Kimpel’, Notes & Queries 50 (2003), 215–18. 4 The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 6 vols. (London, 1804), I, vi.

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Keeper of the Museum, whose published guide to the entire Forster Collec- tion appeared in 1893). But although the letters were extensively consulted there and in other depositories by pioneering Richardsonians such as Clara Linklater Thomson and Austin Dobson, and by more recent generations of scholars, no sig- niﬁcant advance was made on Barbauld’s edition until 1943, when the physician George Cheyne’s letters to Richardson, none of which had appeared in Barbauld, were published in a scholarly edition by Charles F. Mullett. Another substantial addition to the corpus was made in 1969, with William C. Slattery’s publication of Richardson’s correspondence with his Dutch translator, Johannes Stinstra: Barbauld had included three of their letters, but Slattery’s edition contains twenty- three, among them Richardson’s now celebrated autobiographical letter of 2 June 1753. Modern scholarly editions of letters by independently important correspondents of Richardson such as Samuel Johnson (1952, 1992–4), Tobias Smollett (1970), Edward Young (1971), Sarah and Henry Fielding (1993), Edward Moore (1996) and Charlotte Lennox (1970–1, 2012) have also made available hitherto unpublished letters, or in some cases improved texts of published letters. So too has John Carroll’s pioneering Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson (1964), which provides lightly annotated texts of 128 letters to 33 different correspondents, many of them published for the ﬁrst time, though often in excerpted form. For half a century, Carroll’s selection, alongside Barbauld’s, has been the edition cited by Richardson’s critics, as well as by many other scholars of the period. More recently, Carroll and Barbauld provide the basis for Donatella Montini’s Lettere su Clarissa, a more fully annotated selection of thirty-one letters by Richardson, published in 2009. Two and a half centuries after Erasmus Reich’s original proposal for a selected edition in translation, it was in Italian, not German, that something resembling his plan came to fruition, though without adding new letters to the published corpus.

In a well-known letter to Sarah Wescomb of September 1746, Richardson cele- brates ‘the familiar correspondences of friendly and undesigning hearts’, and extols the epistolary mode as ‘indicative, generally beyond the power of disguise, of the mind of the writer’. It was for this offer of intimate access to authentic personal- ity that the private letters of published authors were so prized in the eighteenth century, even before – as the subterfuge surrounding Pope’s Letters of 1737 makes clear – their publication seemed fully legitimate. For the same reason, alongside the obvious value of letters as repositories of day-to-day information, they remain an indispensable resource for biographers. The six hundred or so letters by Richardson now known to survive in manuscript or early printed versions are far from conforming in every case to the ideal of artless transparency that he urged on Wescomb. Much of their fascination comes from the ways in which, as the letters of a major epistolary novelist, they reﬂect his self-consciousness about his chosen form, including its potential for disguise as well as disclosure. Even so, Richard- son’s letters exhibit a private identity unavailable from any other source, and one

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that proves, in light of his surviving correspondence as a whole, far more complex and multi-faceted than the notorious caricature that Samuel Taylor Coleridge derived from his reading of Barbauld: ‘so very vile a mind – so oozy, hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious, concupiscent’.5 In other contexts, Richardson was consistently reluctant to write in his own voice, to the point on several occasions of procuring prefaces to his works from other hands. Letters gave him, by contrast, a protected space for more or less direct self-expression, and those that survive provide unrivalled evidence of his personal life, his moral, social and religious opinions, and above all his thinking about literature and the book trade, the art of fiction, and his own practice as a novelist. No other writer of the period has left such a rich, detailed and sustained account of the composition, reception and revision of his own works. Inevitably, the biographical picture is not complete. No epistolary trace survives of some of Richardson’s most intriguing relationships: with, for example, the unidentified high-born patron who befriended him in his apprentice years, though ‘Multitudes of Letters passed between this Gentleman & me’, he told Stinstra decades later (2 June 1753). His close and enduring friendship with the distinguished parliamentarian Arthur Onslow, Speaker of the House of Commons, is only indirectly glimpsed in surviving exchanges with mutual acquaintances, notably the poet and critic Thomas Edwards. Fewer than eighty traceable items are extant from the 1730s, mainly letters to Richardson from Hill and Cheyne, his most prominent friends of the period, but his own side of these correspondences is very sparse. It was not until achieving fame with Pamela (1740) at the age of 50 that he seems to have begun systematic efforts to preserve, copy and file his correspondence, though these files were apparently depleted by the time they reached Barbauld, and certainly depleted further before the 1828 auction, after which more items disappeared. Like Boswell’s Johnson, Richardson is a figure we witness in sometimes crushing detail for the last twenty years of his life, but one whose youth and middle age are more distantly, patchily seen. Later letters give valuable insights into otherwise irretrievable aspects of his early career, notably the famous letter to Stinstra, an epistolary memoir comparable, as an exercise in short, informal autobiography, with Laurence Sterne’s ‘Memoir’ and David Hume’s ‘My Own Life’. But it is above all in Richardson’s creative maturity, and at his professional peak, when his range of correspondents grew alongside his fame, that he becomes truly present – vividly, copiously so – in epistolary sources. Yet it is not only for information about Richardson himself that the correspondence is an important resource. Thanks to his celebrity as an author, his standing and influence as a book-trade professional, and above all his unrelenting fascination with epistolary dialogue and debate, Richardson was able to draw into the circle of his correspondence numerous leading figures in the literary culture

5 Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection, ed. Seamus Perry (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 82 (4–8 March 1805).

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of his day. Little now survives of the strictly professional correspondence he con- ducted in his capacity as a master printer, including the enormous traffic that must have arisen from the branch of work that distinguished his business, that of parliamentary printing. There are a few business exchanges with prominent trade colleagues such as Andrew Millar and William Strahan, but these are only the tip of an iceberg lost to view. Even so, from his earliest letters to Hill and Cheyne to some of his very last, notably to Catherine Lintot, granddaughter and successor of the printer Bernard Lintot, book-trade concerns are recurrently to the fore, most of all where Richardson is acting as printer for the correspondents involved, or otherwise advising them about publication matters. In this respect his correspondence ranks alongside that of the bookseller Robert Dodsley, or other storehouses like the Bowyer ledgers or Nichols’s Anecdotes, as one of the richest and most wide-ranging sources in the period for the history of authorship and the book trade. It crucially illuminates the lives and works of the significant but now non-canonical authors to whom he was closest, whose correspondence does not otherwise exist in print. Young is the obvious exception in this category, though some new material has come to light since Henry Pettit’s 1971 edition of Young’s correspondence; more typical are Hill, Edwards and Sarah Chapone, a key inter- mediary between Mary Astell and the bluestocking generation who is now best known for her pioneering tract The Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives (1735). Significant bodies of correspondence also survive involving Elizabeth Carter, the novelist Sarah Fielding, the memoirist Laetitia Pilkington and other literary friends such as the Delanys, Patrick and Mary, and the Sheridans, Thomas and Frances, all four leading figures in the cultural life of eighteenth-century Dublin. There are also surviving caches of letters to and/or from, among other significant writers of the period, Thomas Birch, Colley Cibber, Jane Collier, Henry Fielding, David Garrick, Samuel Johnson, Charlotte Lennox, Edward Moore, Sarah Scott, Joseph Spence and William Warburton. It is not entirely an optical illusion, as one reviews these and other names, to see Richardson as inhabiting the very centre of the period’s cultural web, not least as it expanded to accommodate women writers.6 His strenuous promotion of female authorship and learning makes the correspondence an especially important resource for the history of women and print. In 1750 Richardson sent Frances Grainger a list of thirty-six intellectually accomplished women, ‘almost all of them of my intimate Acquaintances’ (8 September 1750), and it was to an overlapping group that Bar- bauld referred when she wrote of the ‘female senate’ among whom Sir Charles Grandison was composed;7 few of these women fail to feature in the surviving correspondence.

6 See Pat Rogers, ‘“A Young, a Richardson, or a Johnson”: Lines of Cultural Force in the Age of Richardson’, in Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor (eds.), Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 203–22, 284–7. 7 Correspondence, ed. Barbauld, I, cxxiii.

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Little less attention is focused today on another category of correspondent, unknown except by virtue of their association with Richardson. Several otherwise obscure figures have become familiar points of reference for scholars, partly for their inherent interest as letter-writers, and partly for the rich evidence they provide about reading and reception. Soon after Grandison appeared, Richardson was approached by an obscure provincial attorney named Eusebius Silvester, whose opening letters combine discussion of the novel’s philanthropic themes with a history of his own condition of impoverished virtue. Five years later, following Silvester’s persistent failure to repay two generous loans, Richardson broke off relations and assembled the correspondence, with explanatory notes and connecting passages, into what he called ‘a Warning Piece to Posterity’ (to Silvester, 21 August 1759) – though he later altered this phrase, with his usual uncertainty about publication, to ‘a Warning Piece to his Friends and Family’. Much happier was the outcome of an earlier unsolicited approach, made during the publication of Clarissa by an anonymous reader who, after extended games of anonymity and misdirection, at last identified herself as Lady Bradshaigh, thereafter the most cherished friend and literary adviser of Richardson’s last years. Surveying the Richardson–Bradshaigh correspondence, Barbauld estimated that it was large enough to fill all six of her 1804 volumes, which indicates that much of it is now lost (as does a reference in the 1828 auction catalogue to ‘many hundred letters of each’, whereas 110 manuscript letters now survive).8 Even so, this remains the lengthiest of Richardson’s surviving correspondences, much of it on literary matters, and comprising in particular, as he observed when considering the Reich proposal, ‘the best Commentary that cd. be written on the History of Clarissa’ (to Lady Bradshaigh, 19 November 1757). Of great related interest is the correspondence that ensued with Lady Echlin, Lady Bradshaigh’s Dublin-based sister, part of which concerns a wish-fulfilling alternative ending to Clarissa that Lady Echlin privately composed. Other correspondences arising from the novels failed to take off, and just single letters survive from readers such as ‘Philo-Paideias’, ‘Philaretes’ and ‘Philopamela’, who all wrote pseudonymously to Richardson during the Pamela vogue. Further letters of the same kind were lost at an early stage, as in a well-known episode during the publication of Clarissa, when Richardson responded to two readers’ letters, one accusing Clarissa of coquetry, the other of prudery, by sending ‘each the other’s letter for a full answer of her’s. And so I lost, at setting out, two correspondents, and what was worse, my two letters, for I never could get them back, and had taken no copies’ (to Lady Bradshaigh, February 1751). Normally he took greater care, and many of the manuscripts in the Forster Collection and elsewhere are not autograph or holograph letters but early copies, made not only

8 Catalogue of Manuscripts, Autograph Letters . . . Also the Richardson Correspondence . . . Sold by Auction by Mr. Southgate (1828), p. 22; for other evidence from the catalogue of lost material, see Peter Sabor, ‘“The Job I Have Perhaps Rashly Undertaken”: Publishing the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson’, Eighteenth-Century Life 35 (2011), 9–28 (at pp. 17–18).

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by Richardson’s daughter Martha and his nephew and amanuensis William, as Barbauld reports,9 but also by Aaron Hill’s brother Gilbert, whom Richardson seems to have employed in some secretarial capacity, and perhaps also by other professional copyists. Thanks to his obsessive interest in the vagaries of reception and interpretation, and to the compelling, controversial nature of the texts them- selves, three substantial archives survive of general correspondence arising from the three major novels, each with a descriptive index by Richardson himself. (Like the auction catalogue, these indexes list various intriguing items that are now missing.) At a time when literary reviewing was in its infancy and formal critical attention was rarely bestowed on novels, this body of material, which Richardson worked hard to expand by provoking his correspondents into debate, often in devil’s-advocate mode, provides an unusually full and detailed archive of literary reception. In the case of the early novel, it is simply unique, not only as historical evidence of reading, but also for its traceable impact on authorial revision. All told, in the surviving correspondence, Richardson’s letters are outnumbered almost two to one by those addressed to him. Yet there is a sense in which he is always present in the correspondence, whether as writer or as addressee. Often he and his interlocutors are pitted in close discussion of one another’s ideas or arguments, sometimes with extensive direct quotation, and obviously with previous items from an exchange to hand for consultation. When Sarah Wescomb complained on 23 November 1750 that Richardson had ‘pulled [her previous letter] in Pieces’, she merely described his standard practice, and his more robust readers responded in kind. One result is that in cases of incomplete survival, such as Richardson’s debate with Hester Mulso about Clarissa, lost items (here, everything on his own side) can be partly reconstructed from the evidence of surviving replies. In other cases, published text can be seen to emerge from the crucible of the correspondence, as when a protracted debate between Richardson and Lady Bradshaigh, in their letters of 1750–3, over the appropriate balance of power between husband and wife feeds demonstrably into Sir Charles Grandison. It has only recently been noticed that an essay contributed by Richardson to Johnson’s Rambler in 1751 began life the previous year as a letter to Frances Grainger concerning the ethics of courtship.10 No less interesting is the overall character conferred by these habits of conver- sation and debate on much of the correspondence. As each individual exchange unfolds, meaning is mutually developed and incrementally extended through a kind of epistolary dialectic, and properly resides not in any individual letter, and certainly not on any one side of a correspondence, but rather within the transaction as a whole. Not infrequently, new layers or wider circles of meaning are created when, in a practice deliberately cultivated by Richardson as a way to ‘mingle minds and concerns’ (to Anne Dewes, 17 August 1750), letters or whole sequences are

9 Correspondence, ed. Barbauld, I, iii. 10 John A. Dussinger, ‘Samuel Richardson’s Manuscript Draft of The Rambler No. 97 (19 February 1751)’, Notes & Queries 57 (2010), 93–9.

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transcribed and circulated within adjacent correspondence networks, so giving rise to further material. The sources exhibit a vigorous manuscript culture in which correspondences commingle, overlap and interact, generating fresh debate and additional writing through the mechanisms of epistolary sociability. Some writers resisted Richardson’s inveterate practice of manuscript circulation, and he was admonished for it by Mary Delany; she had been ‘open and free when I write to you, at all times incorrect, interlining, making blunders’, she told him on 24 April 1751, and was now minded to suspend the correspondence. Other writers ben- efited, however. Long before reaching print in 1807, Mulso’s trenchant, learned correspondence about liberty and authority in Clarissa was widely known, apparently in the highest political circles. Richardson even speculated that it influenced the passage of Hardwicke’s Marriage Act a few years later: ‘Things done in private have sometimes . . . been proclaimed on the house-top’, as he put it to Elizabeth Carter (17 August 1753). These various characteristics of the surviving archive – the prominence within it of important interlocutors whose letters are otherwise inaccessible; its value as evidence of the book trade and literary culture of the mid eighteenth century, and as a capacious record of debates about major novels; the profoundly transactional or dialogic nature of the epistolary sources involved – have two main consequences. Most obviously, they dictate the publication of a full Correspondence in twelve volumes, as opposed to a one-sided Letters in four or five. They also argue strongly for the retention, albeit with necessary modifications, of a principle of organization, correspondence by correspondence, that was first established and implemented by Richardson himself. The obvious advantages of a single chronological sequence of letters notwithstanding, more would be lost than gained by fragmenting individual correspondences and scattering them across multiple volumes, which would mean as many as eight or ten respectively for key correspondents such as Bradshaigh or Young. For this reason, the Cambridge Edition observes the correspondence- specific methodology used by editors in comparable cases elsewhere, including the multi-volume Yale editions of James Boswell, Thomas Percy and Horace Walpole. A complete calendar of the correspondence will be added in the con- cluding volume to facilitate retrieval by date; building on roughly 1,600 letters listed as appendix in T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel’s monumental 1971 biography of Richardson, this calendar will incorporate various corrections and changed locations, the seventy-nine new findings announced at an earlier stage in the present project, and a number of more recent discoveries.11 Other finding aids in this volume will be an index of Richardson’s correspondents and a general index to the entire edition. The volume will also include Richardson’s own indexes to his files of letters on Pamela, Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison; other miscellaneous non-epistolary documents from the Forster Collection; any

11 Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, pp. 620–704; Keymer and Sabor, ‘Samuel Richardson’s Correspondence’.

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additional letters found during the publication of the previous volumes; posthumous correspondence about Richardson, especially that between his daughters Anne Richardson and Martha Bridgen, and between Anne and her niece Sarah Crowther Moodie; and an annotated transcription of the 1828 Southgate auction catalogue. Richardson’s exact organization of his files is not recoverable in detail, but the principle is clear from surviving evidence that includes apparently original foliation numbers (now overlaid on the manuscripts by later referencing sequences); prefa- tory sheets and connecting passages (as in the Hill and Silvester correspondences respectively); notes describing the compilation of a particular correspondence into bound books (Cheyne, Hill) and epistolary exchanges on this subject (Bradshaigh); memoranda restricting access to certain appropriate readers or categories of reader (Cheyne, Edwards). There are also original indexes in Richardson’s hand, not only to the files of letters about the novels (which correspond roughly to the chronologically organized volumes of general correspondence in Volumes 9–11 of the Cambridge Edition), but also to the Edwards correspondence. Broadly speaking, Richardson’s organization continues to be reflected in the Forster Collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the same principle governed Barbauld’s 1804 selection and the subsequent magazine editions. Inevitably, the page length of a modern volume does not always perfectly match the size of a particular correspondence. In these cases, materials have been juxtaposed or combined, either with reference to a broader social network (a volume is devoted to Sarah Chapone, her daughter-in-law Hester Mulso Chapone, and their overlapping circles) or on grounds of thematic congruence. The correspondences with Cheyne and Edwards in Volume 2 of the Cambridge Edition are linked, for example, not only by their pronounced medical content but also by a more generally unguarded, at times frankly defamatory, character that gave unusual intensity to Richardson’s anxieties about future circulation. He stopped short of burning Cheyne’s letters, as Cheyne had requested, but the correspondence was not to fall ‘into such Hands, as that it may be printed, or published’ (note dated 11 August 1744). His cover sheet to the Edwards correspondence carries a stern instruction: ‘No Extracts to be taken from it or Letters copied.’

The formidable practical difﬁculties posed by Richardson’s letters in both their printed and manuscript forms have often been remarked on by scholars. Eaves and Kimpel describe the many letters to and from Lady Bradshaigh for 1751, of which only printed texts in Barbauld survive, as being ‘in utter confusion’, and painstaking efforts have been made by John August Wood to disentangle this particular problem.12 William McCarthy, Barbauld’s biographer, remarks that the texts available to her after their various revisions by Richardson and his correspondents

12 Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, p. 657; John August Wood, ‘The Chronology of the Richardson-Bradshaigh Correspondence of 1751’, Studies in Bibliography 33 (1980), 182–91.

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and heirs were already ‘a thorn patch of multiple copies and different handwritings, with cross-outs and insertions enough to puzzle any would-be editor’.13 Barbauld’s interventions, and those of later owners or curators, introduce further layers of complication, but even letters untouched by later editorial markings can be hard to decipher. Richardson’s hand was cramped and unsteady from an early date, and in the 1750s, from which most of the surviving correspondence dates, he frequently complains about paralysis or tremors, or about the pain and even on occasion the impossibility of writing. Parkinson’s disease is usually assumed, and scientific analysis of Richardson’s remains has revealed a prior condition of diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis, which ‘would undoubtedly have limited extension at the wrist’.14 Obliterations by Richardson and by some of his correspondents, especially Lady Bradshaigh, whether at the time of writing or at later stages, make matters much worse. These obliterations are sometimes heavy enough to make retrieval of the text impossible, even after protracted examination not only of the manuscripts but also of digitally enhanced photographs and scans. In other cases, problems stem from blots or tears in the manuscript causing obscurity or absence of text, and further illegibility results from the heavy cardboard mountings pasted over the extremities of letters in the unwieldy Victorian volumes of the Forster Collection. Not all the texts are quite so hard to establish as that of Richardson’s first known letter to Erasmus Reich, of which only a German translation survives, in a manuscript, housed in a library in Leipzig, which was substantially damaged by allied bombing in World War II. But there is something symptomatic about this case. In the face of all these obstacles and confusions, the aim of the Cambridge Edition is to bring order to the chaotic condition in which Richardson’s massive correspondence comes down to us. It seeks to reproduce, as closely as possible, the state of the text in which each letter was sent and therefore first read. Letters are transcribed from manuscript whenever a manuscript (autograph draft, autograph letter or contemporaneous file or letterbook copy) has survived. When a letter exists in both manuscript and a printed version, or versions, the manuscript in almost all cases takes precedence (one exception being the few cases in which the surviving manuscript is a very rough or vestigial draft and the printed version more accurately records the letter as sent and first read). The printed version may, however, contain material not in the manuscript: the manuscript may be a fragment, or the printed version may stem from a different manuscript copy. In such cases, the printed version is used together with the manuscript in an effort to recreate (though without silent conflation or other eclecticism) the letter as first received. Printed versions are also used to supply words illegible in the manuscript.

13 William McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), p. 413. 14 J. L. Scheuer and J. E. Bowman, ‘The Health of the Novelist and Printer Samuel Richardson (1689–1761): A Correlation of Documentary and Skeletal Evidence’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 87 (1994), 352–5 (at p. 354).

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When more than one manuscript version survives, the manuscript received by a correspondent takes precedence over others, though rough drafts and transcribed copies also come into play where the original text is defective. If a letter survives in both the form of a draft by Richardson and a fair copy, by an amanuensis or a proxy, sent to a correspondent, the fair copy provides the copy-text. If the letter as received does not survive, the surviving manuscript likely to resemble it most closely is used as the copy-text. When a printed version is used as the copy-text (because no manuscript survives), the letter is not necessarily reproduced in its existing state. In Barbauld’s edition, some letters have demonstrably been conflated from different manuscript sources. In such cases, the text of the letter as originally received is reconstructed as far as possible. Where an alternative early printed version exists (such as Aaron Hill’s Works (1753) for the Hill correspondence or the Monthly Magazine for the Edward Young correspondence) a hierarchy between this version and Barbauld’s is established; if both were set directly from the manuscript, the earlier publication does not necessarily take precedence. Standardized headings precede each letter. These headings provide, so far as possible, the day(s) and date(s) of writing, the name of the recipient(s), the source and location of the text, a record of all extant documentary states of the letter, manuscript and printed, before 1830, the address, any endorsement (stating in whose hand, if known, or ‘undetermined’ if not), and the postmark (although these rarely survive). Many of the problems posed by the texts of Richardson’s correspondence resemble those of the letters and journals of Frances Burney, which also survive in a combination of manuscript material, copiously edited by various hands, and a printed edition prepared by a nineteenth-century editor, Charlotte Barrett, who made heavy use of scissors and paste in assembling her edition. Our textual policy is based, with some variations, on that in Peter Sabor’s edition of The Court Journals of Frances Burney, 1786–1791 (6 vols., Oxford University Press, 2011–), which in turn derives from Lars Troide and Stewart Cooke’s Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, 1768–1783 (5 vols., McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988–2012) and Joyce Hemlow’s Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d’Arblay), 1791–1840 (12 vols., Oxford University Press, 1972–84). While recognizing the importance of reflecting the state of the copy-text in each case, we aim to produce an edition in which fidelity to the sources is reconciled with clarity for modern readers. We also recognize that the special character of particular correspondences means that local adjustments to textual policy will be required in certain volumes; if so, these adjustments are outlined in the volume editor’s introduction to the correspondence in question. Texts are reproduced literally, for the most part, with retention of original paragraphing, punctuation, period spellings and misspellings, and neologisms (e.g. objectible). Richardson uses both curved and squared brackets, sometimes for distinct purposes; we have retained both forms. The original use of lower case and capitals is also generally reproduced, although beginnings of sentences and names of people and places are always capitalized. Final periods are supplied when

general editors’ preface

inadvertently omitted at the close of sentences, but not where sentences are infor- mally separated by dashes or other punctuation or where the general practice of the writer (such as George Cheyne or Sarah Wescomb) is to use minimal punctuation. Parentheses and quotation marks are completed when required. Running marginal quotation marks are omitted. Underlinings are represented by italic type. Double and triple underlinings are designated by a footnote. Superscript letters are low- ered. Obvious slips of the pen, as opposed to misspellings, are silently corrected. Obviously inadvertent omissions are supplied within {shaped} brackets. The long ‘s’ has been modernized and the length of dashes has been regularized. Word fragments and inadvertent repetitions are omitted. As David Fairer observes in his edition of Warton, ‘obsolete abbreviations are by far the largest obstacle to the readability of a text’.15 Like Fairer, we expand or normalize all abbreviations not in standard use today. In particular, ‘ye’and‘yt’ (where the ‘y’ is strictly speaking a thorn) are expanded to ‘the’ and ‘that’. The term ‘thro’¯ is also expanded to ‘through’, and ‘re’d’ to ‘read’ or ‘received’, with the addition of a note if the context leaves the meaning of the word ambiguous. Exceptions to the rule are the names of people, the titles of books, the direction and dateline as appearing on the manuscript, the abbreviated past participle (criticiz’d, etc.), and borderline cases between abbreviation and period spelling such as cou’d., ’tis and tho’, all of which are transcribed as they appear in the copy-text. We have not attempted to reproduce the visual appearance of the original manuscripts in terms of layout. If, for example, a postscript is inserted at the beginning of a manuscript, for lack of space at the end, it is printed here in the normal position, with an accompanying note. Regardless of their position in the manuscripts, all salutations are printed flush left, and signatures flush right. Complimentary closes appearing on separate lines in the manuscript are run on as continuations of the last line of text, with conventional punctuation supplied when necessary. Datelines occurring at the head of the manuscript are printed flush right, and those occurring at the foot of the manuscript are printed flush left. Postscripts are printed flush left. Richardson occasionally uses hanging indents as an alternative form of paragraphing for specific purposes, and these are retained. The following symbols are employed in the texts:

<> Text conjecturally supplied by the editor in cases of obliteration, damage or uncertain legibility. If a word or character has been torn or cut away from the manuscript, or rendered wholly illegible by slurring, blotting or other damage, but can still be conjectured from the context, it is printed thus: ‘Lady ’, ‘Grandis’. If a word is not certainly legible, but can be deciphered as a reasonable likelihood, the same symbol is used.

15 The Correspondence of Thomas Warton, ed. David Fairer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. xlviii.

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Three lines have been obliterated and cannot be recovered. Sometimes individual words are legible within generally obliterated passages and if so, these words are recorded. Five or six words have been obliterated and cannot be recovered. <> Blank space left in manuscript by writer or copyist. {}Text supplied by the editor in cases of inadvertent omission. If a word has been omitted, it will be printed thus: ‘I am now {at} Parson’s Green’. The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson is designed to become the uniform scholarly edition. It has extensive introductions, providing authoritative accounts of each of Richardson’s sets of correspondences. Textual and explanatory notes are numbered in a single, combined sequence. This practice makes it possible (where evidence of revision needs explanation in itself, or where it clarifies interpretation of a passage) for textual and explanatory points to be discursively combined. Textual notes normally record only those substantive changes made by the letter-writer at the time of writing, whether to a draft or to the version sent; later revisions, deletions and additions (most of which date from the later 1750s) are not recorded unless they add significant new detail or information. In recording textual changes we have taken a different approach from that of John Carroll, whose Selected Letters uses an elaborate system of symbols (to sig- nal insertions, deletions and conjectural readings) that has led to some confusion in subsequent scholarship; we have aimed instead to create a readable text, with variant readings at the foot of the page. Explanatory notes identify the numerous quotations and allusions, literary, historical and personal. All persons named are identified, as far as possible, although exact birth, marriage and death dates are not always available. Standard encyclopaedias, biographical dictionaries, peerages, baronetages, knightages, school and university lists, medical registers, lists of clergy, town and city directories, army and navy lists, road guides, almanacs and catalogues of all kinds have been used but are not specifically cited except in exceptional cases. Also consulted were a variety of online resources, including the Oxford English Dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the English Short Title Catalogue, Early English Books Online, Eighteenth-Century Collec- tions Online, Literature Online, InteLex Past Masters, the Burney Collection of Newspapers, British Literary Manuscripts Online, the British Book Trade Index, British History Online, Access to Archives, and the Electronic Enlightenment.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In undertaking an editorial task of this nature it is inevitable that a large number of debts accrue, but in particular I would like to thank Tom Keymer and Peter Sabor for their encouraging, scrupulous and patient editorial leadership throughout this project. This was a welcome commission which brought me back to the very foundations of my research into eighteenth-century literature and medicine, as it was my fascination with the contents of the Laing notebook back in the 1980s which inspired me to write my doctoral thesis on Cheyne. My thanks go to the University of Edinburgh for granting permission to publish the contents of Laing Mss. II, 356, and to all the staff at their Centre for Research Collections, who have always been generous with their time and expertise in answering research enquiries. I also thank Cambridge University Press for having the foresight to support such a large-scale and long-term scholarly project, and Linda Bree in particular for her invaluable encouragement and practical support. In addition I would like to thank Christine Gerrard, editor of the Richardson–Hill correspondence, and my other fellow editors of the Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson for their scholarly cooperation, essential to any project of this scope. I also thank the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University for awarding me a visiting fellowship which enabled me to undertake the initial work of transcription from Laing Mss III, 356, and for providing such a supportive scholarly environment. Thanks also go to the Leverhulme Trust for the award of a fellowship back in 2005–6, which provided the necessary relief from my teaching and administrative duties to enable me to make the V&A and Berg transcriptions, establish the ﬁnal copy-text, investigate matters of provenance and research the annotations and introduction. Thanks to Will Slocombe for his expert technical assistance with computer matters at an early stage of this project and to Erin Parker for the care she took in undertaking a ﬁrst stage of copy-editing and for making some very useful suggestions for improvement. I also thank all the staff at the National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum London and the National Library of Scotland, who were invariably helpful and generous with their time and expertise while I was undertaking this editorial work. In particular I thank Declan Kiely at New York Public Library for his prompt assistance. A much older debt dates back to the 1980s when Trevor Fawcett, then Secretary of the History of Bath Research Group, and Colin Johnston, in his capacity as Bath City Archivist, kindly supplied me with information on Cheyne’s payment of parish rates. Thanks also go to my Glasgow colleague Stuart Gillespie for checking my

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acknowledgements

Latin and to Bill Zachs for his scholarly support and encouragement. Last, but far from least, I thank my partner Will Datson not only for his invaluable support with computing matters and for taking on a greater share of domestic tasks while I was working on this project but for patiently listening to my no doubt potentially purgative monologues on ‘whimsical’ Dr Cheyne.

D. S.

I am grateful to the University of Illinois Research Board for helping to ﬁnance in the 1990s my early work on Richardson’s letters. An appointment to the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Illinois in 1994 and travel grants to England to conduct research were invaluable to this project. In more recent years, the University of Illinois Library enabled access to the vast online resources of such Gale databases as the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, the Burney Newspaper Collection and the Early British Manuscripts Collection. Valerie Hotchkiss, head of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, has consistently offered professional expertise and enthusiastic support to my research at this institution. I am especially indebted to the staff at the National Art Library of the Victoria & Albert Museum for permitting me to use the Forster Collection of Richardson’s correspondence. Other institutions that were essential to this edition include the British Library, Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, Yale University Library, Harvard University Library, Brown University Library and Morgan Library. For incisive help with occasional queries, I should mention Jack Lynch, William McCarthy, Thomas McGeary, Albert Rivero, James Sambrook, Bruce Swann and James Tierney. Finally, besides the continual encouragement and assistance from Tom Keymer and Peter Sabor, Sarah Skoronski’s patient and meticulous guidance in preparing this text for the press deserves the highest praise.

J. D.

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CHRONOLOGY

1682 2 June Marriage in London of SR’s parents, Samuel Richardson, Sr (d. 1727), a master joiner, and Elizabeth Hall (d. 1736) 1687 Family leaves London for Derbyshire at about this time, perhaps for political reasons 1689 July–August Born and baptized in Mackworth, near Derby, the fourth of nine children from the marriage 1695–9 Family returns to London during this period, settling in the Tower Hill district 1701–2 Probably educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School, where his schoolfellows know him as ‘Serious and Gravity’ 1706 1 July Apprenticed to John Wilde, a printer of Aldersgate 1713 2 July Completes apprenticeship with Wilde, where SR has become ‘the Pillar of his House’ 1715 13 June Made freeman of the Stationers’ Company and a citizen of London 1715–20 Works as a compositor and corrector in Wilde’s business 1720 Manages the printing business of the Leake family on the corner of Blue Ball and Salisbury Courts; begins printing private bills for James Blew, a lawyer and parliamentary agent 1721 Buys ‘Printing Presses and Letter Utensils of trade’ from the Leakes and sets up as master printer in their former premises, where he resides until 1736; remains in the Salisbury Court district for his entire career

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chronology

23 November Marries Martha, daughter of John Wilde; five sons and a daughter from the marriage die in infancy 1722 5 March Granted the livery of the Stationers’ Company 6 August Three Leake apprentices turned over to SR, the first of twenty-four apprentices bound to him during his career 1722–4 Denounced to the ministry by Samuel Negus, a printer, as one of the ‘disaffected printers . . . Said to be High-Flyers’; continues printing Tory-Jacobite material, including the Duke of Wharton’s periodical The True Briton (1723–4) 1725 December Begins printing The Daily Journal (to 1737), one of several newspapers and periodicals printed by SR until the mid-1740s 1727 11 April Elected to junior office as Renter Warden in the Stationers’ Company 1728 Rents a second Salisbury Court house, opposite the first, for Daily Journal operations (to 1736) September Identified to the ministry by Edmund Curll as printer of a seditious number of Mist’s Weekly Journal 1730 December The Infidel Convicted,possiblybySR 1731 23 January Death of Martha (Wilde) Richardson February Becomes a junior shareholder in the Stationers’ Company, purchasing progressively more senior levels of stock in 1736, 1746, and 1751 October Incurs financial losses on the collapse of the Charitable Corporation; embroiled until mid-1733 in related legal proceedings 1733 3 February Marries Elizabeth Leake (d. 1773), sister of the Bath bookseller James Leake

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chronology

February Appointed ﬁrst ofﬁcial printer to the House of Commons (to 1761), responsible for public bills and committee reports; SR thereby becomes ‘more independent of Booksellers (tho’ I did much Business for them) than any other Printer’ December The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum 23 December Baptism of daughter Elizabeth, d. 1734 1734 Expands business premises into a third house, in Blue Ball Court (to 1740) 1735 2 January Baptism of daughter Mary (Polly), m. 1757 (to Philip Ditcher), d. 1783 April A Seasonable Examination of the Pleas and Pretensions of the Proprietors of, and Subscribers to, Play-Houses June Probably begins printing the pro-ministerial Daily Gazetteer (to 1746) 1736 Moves to ‘House of a very grand outward Appearance’ on Salisbury Square, which he occupies until 1756; also rents Corney House, a tenement of Sutton Court, Chiswick, as a weekend/summer retreat (to 1738) January Gentleman’s Magazine publishes a light verse epistle by SR, noting that ‘the Publick is often agreeably entertain’d with his Elegant Disquisitions in Prose’ 16 July Baptism of daughter Martha (Patty), m. 1762 (to Edward Bridgen), d. 1785 1737 16 August Baptism of daughter Anne (Nancy), d. 1803 1738 Summer Rents large semi-rural retreat at North End, Fulham (to 1754) October Edits and prints updated second edition of Defoe’s Tour, also subsequent editions of 1742, 1748, 1753, and 1761–2 1739 26 April Baptism of son Samuel, d. 1740

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chronology

10 November Starts writing Pamela 20 November Æsop’s Fables 1740 January Completes draft of Pamela, revising the text over the ensuing months 29 March The Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe in His Embassy to the Ottoman Porte, edited and printed by SR for the Society for the Encouragement of Learning 17 July Baptism of twelfth and last child, Sarah (Sally), m. 1763 (to Richard Crowther), d. 1773 6November Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded 1741 Expands his printing premises behind Salisbury Court 23 January Letters Written to and for Particular Friends 28 May Opening volume of John Kelly’s Pamela’s Conduct in High Life, a spurious continuation, published; SR starts planning his own authorized continuation 1 December Elected to the Court of Assistants, ruling body of the Stationers’ Company 7 December Pamela in Her Exalted Condition, SR’s continuation 1742 8 May Sixth edition of Pamela, in octavo format and with twenty-nine engravings by Hubert Gravelot and Francis Hayman: the ﬁrst simultaneous publication of both parts May Wins large contract to print the Journals of the House of Commons (to 1761) 1744 Begins printing the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (to 1761), one of several major projects for learned societies June–July Earliest references in SR’s correspondence to Clarissa, which already exists in some form of draft December Sends part of the novel in manuscript to Aaron Hill; manuscript copies in various states of revision circulate among SR’s friends until 1747

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chronology

1746 Summer Assists the ministry in ﬁnding shorthand experts to help prosecute Jacobite rebels December Hill sends SR his ‘Specimen of New Clarissa’, a test abridgement of the novel’s opening 1747 1 December Clarissa, Vols. i and ii 1748 28 April Clarissa, Vols. iii and iv 5 July William Richardson, nephew, apprenticed to SR 2 August Advertises in the Whitehall Evening-Post for contact with Lady Bradshaigh, who has been sending pseudonymous letters about Clarissa 6 December Clarissa, Vols. v–vii 1749 June Prints Answer to the Letter of a Very Reverend and Worthy Gentleman,adefenceofClarissa’s ﬁre scene, for private distribution August Publishes notes responding to Albrecht von Haller’s critique of Clarissa in the Gentleman’s Magazine December Prints Meditations Collected from the Sacred Books for private distribution 1750 6 March First face-to-face meeting with Lady Bradshaigh, thereafter his closest literary adviser August Death of SR’s brother Benjamin; household joined by Benjamin’s 14-year-old daughter Susanna (Sukey), ‘whom my Wife has in a manner adopted’ 1751 January Sections of Sir Charles Grandison start to circulate in manuscript among SR’s friends 19 February Publishes an essay (no. 97) on courtship and marriage in Samuel Johnson’s periodical The Rambler, based on SR’s letter of 8 September 1750 to Frances Grainger

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chronology

20 April Expanded third edition of Clarissa; new material separately published as Letters and Passages Restored from the Original Manuscripts of the History of Clarissa 1752 28 September Fire at SR’s printing house causes extensive damage and loss of stock; takes on additional Salisbury Court premises at about this time, probably as a warehouse and workmen’s residence 1753 May Begins distributing printed sheets of Sir Charles Grandison among friends 2 June Writes autobiographical letter to Johannes Stinstra, his Dutch translator 30 June Attains rank of Upper Warden in the Stationers’ Company August Learns that four Dublin booksellers have stolen most of Sir Charles Grandison in printed sheets and plan to publish an unauthorized edition; halts printing and ﬁres suspected employees 14 September The Case of Samuel Richardson, of London, Printer; with Regard to the Invasion of His Property printed for free distribution 13 November Sir Charles Grandison,Vols.i–iv, simultaneously published in duodecimo (‘ﬁrst’) and octavo (‘second’) editions; Vols. i–vi of the piracy appear in Dublin the same month, before SR can bring out his authorized Vols. v–vi 11 December Sir Charles Grandison,Vols.v–vi (duodecimo) and Vol. v (octavo) 1754 1 February Prints An Address to the Public, a further attack on the Dublin pirates and on George Faulkner, an Irish bookseller, with whom he had failed to negotiate a solution 14 March Sir Charles Grandison,Vol.vii (duodecimo) and Vol. vi (octavo) 19 March Revised third edition of Sir Charles Grandison (duodecimo)

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